Escape From Booty Bay (efbb) is the newest game made using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. It’s a physics puzzle game in which players operate a cannon to stop pirates escaping from the prison. As players advance through the game levels, difficulty increases and new challenges are placed, like firing against moving targets.

The main goal of this game is to test and demonstrate the usage of EPhysics. EPhysics is a library that integrates the EFL and Bullet Physics. More details can be found at this post.

I’ve being working on this game here at ProFUSION with Ricardo de Almeida Gonzaga (software developer) and Marina Proni (designer), while Leandro Dorileo and I continued the development of EPhysics, adding new features and fixing bugs. Great job, team!

Its initial version reached SVN last week, and can be checked out with:

The video covers the tests that are included in our source code, as one can see the code is pretty simple to an EFL programmer and we expect them to adopt EPhysics to create their next splash screen, transition effects and even more games!

Why Bullet Physics?

Bullet Physics is a very well established physics engine. It’s stable, fast and simple to use, licensed under a permissive license and packaged for most distributions. It’s used by many big companies for games and movies such as Sony, Disney, Activision and Rockstar Games.

How is it structured?

It’s possible to create a World and add many Bodies, that can be represented by Evas Objects. These bodies have physical attributes such as mass, friction and restitution and shape. They may receive impulses and collide between them. Events occur when something happens, as a body moving, two bodies colliding, or the entire world getting halted (all the bodies stopped). The following diagram should help to make it all a bit clearer.

Everything is documented using doxygen, so you can build documentation with:

$ make doc

or access it online here. It’s just a temporary place until it reaches our project’s server.

And much more is coming. On our roadmap we have:

Create collision shapes from image;

Helpers to help the physics inexperienced people to define attributes and use it;

Sandbox tools to try different materials / properties in a live, what-you-see-is-what-you-get way;

Deform objects;

Adding camera concept (POV);

Creating a game

A more extensive list can be found at TODO file. Adding support to physics effects on Edje is planned as well, making it possible to configure physics environment and reacting to events.

So if you liked that, give it a try. I’ll be glad to help. Bug reports, reviews, feature requests and patches are very welcome. I’ll try to post a tutorial on creating applications with EPhysics soon.

I’m migrating the game Nines Time from github to our beloved svn repository. Tonight, finally, I had time to fix the last 2 known bugs and substitute an image for something a bit less fugly. My hope is that, being there, more people will notice its existence, using it like an example of python bindings usage, will play it, and (who knows) maybe contribute to make it better.

Nines Time is a game about digit 9 tyranny over the other digits. You are a 6 undercovered for years studying the 9s and providing information for your HQ so you could stop them, but your arms fail after years of handplant and you need to survive for 9 minutes until your pals rescue you. What’s your weapon? Math, dude! You need to operate the number trying to get you.

It started as an entry for last month PyWeek, as jprvita already mentioned on his blog, when I “worked” with him, acidx and antognolli. Actually, it was more about fun than anything else. Using efl python bindings is really straight-forward. If you’re interested on the development process during the challenge, there’s a diary.

Some people complained about the chosen music. It’s Priya’s Journey fault for not recording anything so far 😉

This week a couple of games reached Enlightenment repository. They are in the first hours of development and a bit ugly. If you are a designer, please give us a hand =)

While talking to Luis Strano we decided to have a game hack day on Sunday, 21 November. We’ll be hacking and hanging around #edevelop, nothing too formal. If you are interested, Barbieri wrote a list of simple games asking to be developed.

If you want to check out this stuff:

svn co https://svn.enlightenment.org/svn/e/trunk/GAMES

You will find there a good looking game too, eskiss, developed by Raoul Hecky,as you can check in this video.

So, if you are looking for some fun on this Sunday, talk to us at #edevelop@freenode.net.